David Chang and Peter Meehan have a new series on Netflix called Ugly Delicious that survives like a voicemail from an ex you don’t want to erase. Lucky Peach, the magazine they started together that defined the more energetic edges of food writing since 2011, shuttered unexpectedly near the end of 2017. And while Ugly Delicious seems like a continuation of both the Lucky Peach aesthetic and intellectual pursuit, the filming predates the closing of the magazine. It was filmed, at least in large part, near the end of 2016.
The closing of Lucky Peach left a lot of fantastic writers and editors out of work at a time when most media was experiencing a critical slowdown and laying off loads of talent. And while those forces likely contributed to the magazine’s demise, the show foreshadows that an underlying lack of resolution between Meehan and Chang may have been more critical.
Throughout the series, Meehan is investing in the question of “What’s interesting here?” while Chang is investing in his own existential conflict and using the show like a theater of the conflicted mind.
Now going by “Dave,” the opinionated chef of Momofuko fame has often gained his inspiration, like so many others, from the art of the high-low. But unlike those who master the balance, Chang has often seemed frustrated—but also energized—by the push and pull. The friction is the goal, not the balance. Around elitists, he violates expectations by embracing the lowbrow. Around culinary punching bags, he isolates himself with higher-minded fare. Basically, Dave Chang takes the temperature of whatever room he’s in at the time, then dresses inappropriately for it.
Ugly Delicious is positioned such that it seems Chang is finally interested in embracing, rather than rejecting, that contrarianism. He takes a backseat to more conversations than ever, prodding his guests into doing the hard mental labor. At least for a time. The series finale is a reversal of this anxious humility, as he takes the stage in a literal debate format to do battle representing Asian cuisine (which, he says, hasn’t gotten its due) against the oppressive regime of Italian fare (which, he says, is unfairly held in high regard, despite being remarkably similar).
While often positioned as East vs. West in the series, there are clear self-hating narratives at work as well. His friend David Choe basically mocks him until he’s willing to eat donkey, even after he’s told it’s the most delicious meat in Beijing. Chang himself goes on about how embarrassed he was by his mother’s food, not because he didn’t like it, but because his grade-school friends thought it was weird.
And then there’s the battle of the high-low that Chang is so well known for. At Chang’s behest, fundamentalist pizza maker Mark Iacono travels to New Haven for the white clam pizza and surprisingly loves it. Meanwhile, Chang tries to convince the table that Domino’s is pretty good, actually. Later Chang enjoys the Mariscos Jalisco tacos (because they remind him of Chinese food), but then promptly takes the group, including a silently disappointed Jonathan Gold, to Taco Bell for some unreciprocated lowbrow playfulness. It all comes off as a bit overly-pandering to the idea of the high-low, which doesn’t require such a hardworking sense of ironic detachment to function properly. Everyone on the show seems to feel it, but they oblige.
While the show is set up as Chang’s fight against culinary purity (and he arguably does a good job of it at times), the plot is mostly the guests having to constantly reorient Chang’s own inconsistent—but strongly held—opinions in order to make any sense of anything. Chang is not so much a chef looking to find a way forward for his ideas as much as someone who’s entertaining himself by breaking the code and watching others try to dance around the mess. It’s not the purity of the culinary world he seems to be striking down at times, so much as it is the confidence others have obtained that he seems to want to question even as he so clearly seeks his own.
“I’m just in here making pies. I don’t even pay attention to what goes on out there.” Iacono says in the first episode, shrugging with a humility and lack of concern for the implications.
That’s not to say that Chang doesn’t have some insightful, cut-to-the-bone opinions that the world would do well to consider. Last year while beer geeks and famous brewers alike railed against his opus to shitty beer, one nugget buried within the prose was that industrial light Lager can pass as a dry Champagne on the right occasion.
“It’s bubbly and has a little hint of acid and tannin and is cool and crisp and refreshing.” This is the killer argument he makes for a mass-produced product that’s lost all credibility among those who claim to care about beer. And in one sentence, he put it on a defensible pedestal above the rest. But it comes after spilling about 800 words of faux high-low positioning necessary to constitute a culture flare that was so obvious he felt the need to couch it with, “I am not being falsely contrarian or ironic in a hipsterish way.”
Okay, Dave.
This kind of positioning takes on a different tone and aesthetic in Ugly Delicious, but it’s essentially the same. Chang is presented as if he’s on a quest of sorts, seeking out the things that will make him truly happy as a chef, cook, and eater so he can take those insights with him into the next stage of his still-uncertain culinary ambitions. But too often, it results in a series of opinion-driven identities that he’s testing out on others to see how convincing they are. And when no one seems to bite, he puts it down and tries on another. His only real foil seems to be Choe, who routinely sees Chang as the contrarian he’s always been, calling bullshit nearly every 30 seconds with the precision and relational confidence usually only found among siblings. To Chang’s credit, these moments of conflict in which he’s highly vulnerable, routinely make the final cut. However, it also serves to make him one of the least reliable narrators.
There are also moments of true curiosity from Chang, sometimes enough to carry entire episodes with his enthusiasm alone. His child-like wonder at the Vietnamese-style crawfish in Houston, not to mention the city’s somewhat recent embrace of immigrant food cultures, enlivens his sleepy Brooklynite persona with an unburdened optimism. Likewise, his attachment to Peking Duck, presented as a deceptively simple preparation, seems to be some sort of decoder for where the balance of his actual high-low scale, unencumbered by the prospect of a GQ readership, truly lives. And his reaction to the Japanese chef using a rare charcoal “BBQ” process is nothing if not entirely inspiring to watch as Chang loses his composure and the chef begins to cry. It’s the only part of the series, that we know of, where Chang basically asks the camera guy to leave them alone, and he re-enters the restaurant without the crew.
Unexpectedly, however, it’s the Thanksgiving episode that sets the table for what would happen to Lucky Peach. Listen carefully and you’ll hear that the episode was filmed in November of 2016, only months before the partners, Chang, Meehan and a fellow writer, Chris Ying, would decide to end its run because of differences in vision.
As Meehan told The New York Times that following March:
“‘Dave and I have had a difficult but successful partnership for years, like two objects that both have intense gravitational pull,’ said Mr. Meehan, who wrote the Momofuku cookbook with Mr. Chang in 2009. ‘It made interesting friction for a while, but I think we just kind of collided in the last six months.’”
In the Thanksgiving episode, Chang is clearly antagonized—but also dearly calmed—by his mother’s presence. His discomfort with being Korean as a young boy starts to unwind into the larger narrative, especially as it relates to his embarrassment over the food at times. You can sense his yearning to return to some of those long-gone memories and re-contextualize them, as if to gain a new kind of power from rewriting his own feelings in retrospect.
This episode also begins in New York, in Chang’s own apartment, where he sleepily makes a simple breakfast of meat, potatoes, and broth. Cooking at home is something he admittedly had never done much of until recently. “This is food that I actually make at home, and food that I now want to make in a restaurant,” he says. “This is something I would never have served in a restaurant before. It looks like jail food.”
Cut to Chang’s mother’s house where he works tirelessly next to Meehan in the family kitchen to prepare dinner for the whole Chang family. Halfway through, Meehan remarks: “I don’t know that we have ever cooked alongside each other,” which comes as a surprise to anyone who accepted the framing of the series that these two are on a mission in any way jointed. The scene quickly turns into a series of statements that are deeply dark (“So much pain.”), deeply revealing of the long-term dynamic (“It’s the longest, most intimate male relationship I’ve ever been involved in.”), and, quite simply, sad (“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me in the decade we’ve been working together.”).
Following that episode, one starts to realize that, for most of the series, Meehan is off on his own in downstate Illinois, or in Mexico for the Noma pop-up, where he exhibits the clarity of a writer and researcher who wants terribly to understand more and exercise his talents. Meanwhile, Chang doesn’t seem to know what makes something better anymore. In fact, he seems unsure if the simple and austere qualities of home cooking can carry a restaurant business. He also seems to doubt that the inventive and undiscovered peaks are something that he can personally attain.
“One of the reasons I wanted to be in this industry is to reach for impossible goals,” he says in one episode. “And while the mean is much higher than ever before, the difference between the lowest of the low and the highest of the high is not that much different anymore. And it’s harder to find the titans.”
I’d argue that it was easier for Chang to once convince himself he was among those titans, or soon would be. But the momentum from aspiring chefs below is rising faster than he can climb those last few rungs. And his most important partner in that journey, Meehan, seems to have lost interest in that journey now that it’s become paralyzed by self-doubt.
“They’re a restaurant company and we’re a media company,” Meehan told The Times, as he tried to explain the thinking behind a letter written to staffers with the closing announcement that began: “Your mom and I have been meaning to talk to you for a while.”
Which makes it all the more surprising that it’s Chang who is now moving forward with a media company of his own. With Meehan walking away, and Lucky Peach folding, one might expect that Chang’s in a position to focus on resolving his cognitive dissonance and finding his path forward as a chef without all the distraction of having a camera follow his every existential moment. But that’s not how the rebounds to breakups usually go. We rarely solve the problems that haunt us from one relationship to the next, and instead, we reinvent the aesthetics of who we are and hope the next person is slower to discover our real, underlying needs.
Just today, Chang announced that he’s launching a media platform across TV, podcast, and editorial platforms. It’s very likely this will be a fantastic product for readers, listeners, and watchers—at least for awhile. But for Chang, I suspect it will do little to help him answer any of the internal questions he seemed so interested in resolving through Ugly Delicious. The place of Asian cuisine in the world. Whether he wants to respect, or reinvent, traditions. Whether he wants to be a home cook making authentic food for people he loves, or a chef at the pinnacle others look up to, making esoteric dishes for people he seems to, justifiably, sometimes despise. Whether he wants to be a chef at all in an industry where he and others might never be able to assert that he’s the best. Whether he’s still embarrassed by his mother’s cooking. Whether he can, or wants to, shake the feeling of looking at himself through the lens of a predominantly white, upper-class elite. Whether the problem is the food he wants to cook, or the people he wants to cook it for.
In Ugly Delicious, we saw what happens when the desire to produce another season of a series directly conflicts with the desire to find the answer to the underlying questions. The show becomes its own Big Bad, of sorts, doing constant, scripted battle with the concept of “the end.”
For now, as Chang ventures into the world of media without his trusted partner, I suspect we’ll either see a more direct exploration and conflict of Chang’s often very interesting and entertaining ego, or we’ll get a much more banal result: the perpetual buffering of meaning.
